Craig EllisonDelorme Earthmate GPS LT-20 with Street Atlas USA 2006Although the Earthmate GPS has lots of great features, it's difficult to program and tracking errors limit its usability as a navigation aid.

Feature-rich program. POI database appears more up to date than the one with Microsoft Streets and Trips. Good GPS logging features. Voice prompting announces turn and street name. Voice recognition facilitates in-car use.

Cons

User interface is hard to learn. GPS inaccuracy caused numerous routing errors when used for navigation.

Bottom Line

Although the Earthmate GPS has lots of great features, it's difficult to program and tracking errors limit its usability as a navigation aid.

The hardware end of the Delorme Earthmate GPS LT-20 with Street Atlas 2006 is a small, roughly rectangular receiver that sits on the dashboard and is held in place with a suction cup. A 5-foot cord supplies the connection to your laptop, which generally sits on the passenger seat or the front-seat passenger's lap.

Users of previous Street Atlas USA versions, will notice some user interface improvements designed to make the 2006 release easier to use. One addition is the EZ-Nav toolbar that runs across the top of the screen. It lets you set the starting and ending points for your trip, enable or disable the GPS receiver, open the options dialog menus, and share maps on the Web. An icon represents each function, so for those expecting the familiar Microsoft Windows interface of "File," "Edit," "View, "Help," and so on, the interface takes some time to get used to.

According to Delorme, Street Atlas 2006 has been upgraded with 268,000 new roads, and its POI (points of interest) database updated with data supplied by lodging, gasoline, restaurant, and retail chains. For our POI test, we scanned a two-mile radius around our home for restaurants. The software found significantly more restaurants and had more recent information on eateries that had changed hands than did Microsoft Streets and Trips 2006. The GPS "Radar" feature lets you search for points of interest around your current location or along your route.

The software also includes a new feature that plays GPS logs back in real time or at up to 50 times as fast, displaying each data point on the map. The map scrolls to keep the current data point centered. Each point shows the data associated with it: date, time, speed, bearing, altitude, city, state, and ZIP code. The log file summary shows the date, starting and ending times, total log time, and total distance traveled.

Like Streets and Trips 2006, Street Atlas 2006 provides voice-prompted turn-by-turn directions. It trumps S&T 2006, though, by not only announcing upcoming turns, but by also using text-to-speech conversion to pronounce the street names. Street Atlas also responds to verbal commands. Without any speech training, it recognized all of the voice commands we tested from its vocabulary of 60. These included routing instructions such as next turn or after that, and map commands such as pan left (or right), scroll up (down), and zoom in (out).

You can also tell Street Atlas to graphically display your next two turns or switch to a list of directions. One frequently tested command was Where am I?. A typical response would be something like, "You are on Route 17 headed south-southeast at thirty-four miles per hour in North Arlington, New Jersey." The voice-recognition feature really facilitates using the productespecially if you are driving without a human navigator.

Though the user interface in Street Atlas 2006 has been updated, navigating through the icons across the top of the screen and the tabbed interface in the middle was more cumbersome than getting along in the Microsoft interface. This software also has many more features than S&T 2006. The combination means that despite the flash-based tutorial, a first-time laptop-GPS user will take significantly longer to learn this program than the less-full-featured Microsoft product. On the other hand, you would expect learning a more feature-rich product to take longer.

The true test of performance for a GPS-based product is a road trip, of course. When we ran the same routing test as we did with S&T 2006, the route recommended seemed less direct, and the map database didn't know about a recently completed ramp that was part of the S&T 2006 route. Granted, our test was over a fairly limited range, but it was designed to test new and old streets as well as residential and state routes. On the other hand, we liked that unlike S&T 2006, Street Atlas 2006 automatically recalculated our route after we made an (intentional) error.

Our biggest disappointment was with the GPS errors we encountered. We don't know whether they were related to accuracy of the hardware or to the mapping of the data, but in several of our tests, Street Atlas reported that we were off route when we were actually on well-established roads that were part of our course. This occurred both on New Jersey State Route 120 and on the main road near our home. Over the course of several days, the same errors occurred on the road near our home and on the mapping of streets in our subdivision. Poor satellite reception was not the cause, apparently. In all cases, Street Atlas reported a 3D fix, meaning that the receiver was in contact with three satellites.

Street Atlas 2006, as noted, is much more fully featured than Microsoft's Streets and Trips 2006 but harder to use. That in itself isn't terrible, but our experiences showed GPS accuracy to be a serious problem.

Delorme Earthmate GPS LT-20 with Street Atlas USA 2...

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